Jean Stein Libros

Revised, with a new coverWhen Edie was first published, it quickly became an international best-seller and then took its place among the classic books about the 1960s. Edie Sedgwick exploded into the public eye like a comet. She seemed to have it all: she was aristocratic and glamorous, vivacious and young, Andy Warhol’s superstar. But within a few years she flared out as quickly as she had appeared, and before she turned twenty-nine she was dead from a drug overdose.In a dazzling tapestry of voices—family, friends, lovers, rivals—the entire meteoric trajectory of Edie Sedgwick’s life is brilliantly captured. And so is the Pop Art world of the ‘60s: the sex, drugs, fashion, music—the mad rush for pleasure and fame. All glitter and flash on the outside, it was hollow and desperate within—like Edie herself, and like her mentor, Andy Warhol. Alternately mesmerizing, tragic, and horrifying, this book shattered many myths about the ‘60s experience in America.

Kennedys: Stories of Life and Death from an American Family collects 21 of the best stories about the Kennedys. Here are the real stories of brothers John, Robert, and Teddy, told by the finest political writers and social observers of the past half-century. Norman Mailer's celebrated Esquire essay about the 1960 Democratic Convention shows JFK and Jackie at the start of a new epoch in American politics and culture. Writers like Richard Reeves and Jack Newfield trace disparate threads in the Kennedy epic, from the first soldier's death in Vietnam on JFK's watch to Teddy's ineffectual but strangely moving run for the presidential nomination in 1979. Inevitably, the book recounts tragedy, from the 1948 plane crash that killed the beloved and impetuous Kathleen to the assassinations of JFK and Robert. Kennedys deals with scandal as well, but writers such as Gore Vidal, Joe McGinniss, and Seymour M. Hersh mine the stories for new meaning. The essays in this collection offer insights into the loves, hatreds, and dearest ambitions of the Kennedys and help to explain their remarkable grip on our culture.

West of Eden is the definitive story of Hollywood, told, in their own words, by the people on the inside: Lauren Bacall, Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper, Frank Gehry, Ring Lardner, Joan Didion, Stephen Sondheim - all interviewed by Jean Stein, who grew up in the Forties in a fairytale mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The book takes us from the discovery of oil in the Twenties with the story of the tycoon Edward Doheny (There Will Be Blood) and traces the growth of corruption through the syndicates, the mob, and the movie studios - from the beginnings of the film industry to the end, with News Corp. and Rupert Murdoch (who bought the Stein mansion in 1985). West of Eden is about money, power, fame and terrible secrets: the doomed Hollywood of the late Fifties, early Sixties - 'the rotten heart of paradise'. Like her last book, the best-selling Edie, this is an oral history told through brilliantly edited interviews. As this is Hollywood, it's a book full of sex, drugs and celebrity glamour; but because it's built from the firsthand accounts of people who were actually there, many of them writers, actors and artists, it's also strangely claustrophobic, seductive, and completely compelling.